From the scientific article of J. Herling and W. Broll: “Advanced self-contained object removal for realizing real-time diminished reality in unconstrained environments” in Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), 2010 9th IEEE International Symposium on, pages 207-212, October 2010, a method is known for the removal of a visual object from a video data stream, which preferably runs in real time. The method makes it possible for a user to mark a visual object, after which it is removed from the image. The region of the removed object is filled in with image content, which is supposed to come as close as possible to the image content behind the removed object. For the replacement of the image contents, regions of the image are selected outside the removed region, while an increased expense is required for the visual adaptation when the regions used for the replacement are placed alongside each other, especially at the transitions between them. The criterion used for selection of the regions used for the replacement is a measure describing the visual similarity between the selected region and the replaced region. Another criterion is a measure of the distance between the mentioned regions.
Other methods are known from the prior art which are used to remove visual objects from an image and replace them accordingly. The regions used for the replacement are selected by means of their visual similarity to the regions being replaced, as is known for example from the scientific article of L. Demanet, B. Song and T. Chan.: “Image inpainting by correspondence maps: a deterministic approach” in Computer, 1100(03-40):21750, 2003 and the scientific article of A. Criminisi, P. Perez and K. Toyama: “Region filling and object removal by exemplar-based image inpainting” in Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on, 13 (9): 1200-1212, September 2004.